What audit trail protections does the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) already require?
HAVA requires voting machines to produce a “permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity,” but this provision fails to mandate anything beyond a print-out of whatever the machine records electronically. H.R. 550 does not change HAVA’s audit technology “a permanent paper record;” it makes the audit record more meaningful by requiring that the voters, rather than the voting machines, verify the accuracy of what is printed on it. In other words, while HAVA requires a paper record, the contents of the paper record are not required to be voter-verified. As a result, voters would never know and election officials could never determine whether a faulty voting machine erroneously recorded the voters intent and that erroneous data was printed on the “permanent paper record.” H.R. 550 would require that voters be able to verify the accuracy of a paper record of their vote, which will mirror the electronic copy of their vote if nothing is amiss with the software, and neither voters nor ele
